Gag Order: Muting, Mortification, and
Motherhood in Eminem’s
“Cleaning Out My Closet”
Most children, it seems safe to say, will at some point in life be
embarrassed by their parents, whether with baby pictures, unflattering
anecdotes, or merely their well-intended presence at a social function. Few,
however, strike back with a virulence like that of the rapper in Marshall
“Eminem” Mathers’s apostrophic song “Cleaning Out My Closet” (The Eminem
Show, 2002). In The Pursuit o f Signs, Jonathan Culler writes of apostrophes—
direct second-person address—in lyric poetry that “above all they are
embarrassing: embarrassing to me and to you” as “images of invested passion”
(135-138) and may be employed by a poet “to give the dead or inanimate a
voice and make them speak” (153). In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,”
Barbara Johnson writes that as the “direct address of an absent, dead, or
inanimate being by a first-person speaker,” apostrophe ventriloquistically
“throws voice, life, and human form into the address ee.” She reads apostrophic
poems by Baudelaire and Shelley as self-reflexive contemplations on the
possibility of animation through rhetoric; in them, apostrophe becomes “not just
the poem’s mode but also the poem’s theme.” Following this notion of the
literalization of “language’s capacity to give life” into poems about abortion, in
which speakers use direct address to animate and give voice to aborted children,
Johnson asserts that the life-giving act of address creates a state of suspended
animation in which the children can stay “alive” indefinitely. In a rather more
vitriolic—though no less passionate—tone than most of the poems Culler and
Johnson examine, “Cleaning Out My Closet” takes their ideas about apostrophe
in alternate affective directions; namely, through its angry, forestalling mode of
address, it humiliates instead of embarrassing, it silences while purporting to
give voice, and it turns animation into a cadaverous stasis. Instead of
hyperbolically ventriloquizing dead or inanimate objects, this malevolent
incarnation of apostrophe humiliates by taking away the voice of the living.
The title “Cleaning Out My Closet” both privileges the rapper’s own
voice over anyone else’s and implies some kind of revelation, some exposure
and exposition of sordid secrets and sins, and the rapper’s diction reveals his
desire to make that display as loudly public as possible. He repeatedly positions
himself at the forefront of crowd scenes, being “protested and demonstrated
against,” causing “all this commotion,” and describing his life as “the Eminem
Show.” And if it is a show, he makes it a spectacular courtroom drama in which
little order is to be found. Indeed, this drama is hardly fictional; Deborah
Mathers filed a lawsuit against her son in 1999, seeking ten million dollars in
damages for slander (the suit was settled for $25,000, of which all but $1,600
went to her lawyers) (Moss 2001).